Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Ps. 37:4)
But what are the “desires of your heart”?
For the Westians it’s sexual license and an all-you-can-eat dessert buffet. For them and for many quasi-secularists in the Church this beautiful verse from Psalm 37 isn’t echoed by Jesus Christ when He says, “I am he who searches hearts and minds” (Rev. 2:23). For them there is nothing to search. Desire is all a sort of biological urge and it’s rather superficial, even though we spiritualize it and call even nudism and exhibitionism “Theology of the Body”. As I’ve said before, these pop-culture Catholics fail to see the role of the Cross in the fulfillment of desire; they fail to admit the integration of sacrifice and renunciation into love. Like the secularists that surround us, they ignore the fact that desire is only productive within a very limited channel that God has already dug and laid out for us, and that outside of that channel, it can overwhelm us and the world like Noah’s flood.
I think this springs from a serious confusion about the role of desire in our lives – and ultimately about the role of love.
So again, what are the “desires of your heart”?
For some it’s not so much sex, but baubles, trinkets, vanities. When the Preacher tells us that “all is vanity” in the book of Ecclesiastes, he’s at least including things like wisdom and effort – and he’s not right when he says this, but he at least had to ponder some deep things to get to that conclusion. However it takes no depth of wisdom, no preacher like Qoheleth, to see that our mercantile culture, where all desire is created by advertising and satisfied by shopping, is not only “vane” but also “inane”.
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| No, it’s not Jesus – it’s Beatle George! |
Even the Beatles got this. Even the Eastern-mystery-loving George Harrison understood that this consumer culture is about scam artists creating false and shallow desires that they satisfy with snake oil, smoke and mirrors. They not only sell the sizzle instead of the steak – but they deliver fizzle instead of sizzle and sell us out in the process.
I don’t know why nobody told you
how to unfold your love
I don’t know how someone controlled you
they bought and sold you
In other words, there are those among us who will treat us as if we are indeed homo consumens, “consuming man”, and that the desires of our hearts are no deeper than the passing thrills that tickle our fancies. Erich Fromm, who coined the phrase homo consumens, elaborates on this …
I think many people, if they were honest with their concept of heaven, would imagine heaven to be a tremendous department store in which they could buy something new every day and perhaps a little more than their neighbors.
Fromm goes on, expounding on the state of our modern culture …
… everything and almost everybody is for sale. Not only commodities and services, but ideas, arts, books, persons, convictions, a feeling, a smile — they all have been transferred into commodities. And so is the whole of man, with all his facilities and potentialities.
… so that the young end up less than fully human …
Many of the younger generation tend to have no character at all. By that I do not mean that they are dishonest; on the contrary, one of the few enjoyable things in the modern world is the honesty of a great part of the younger generation. What I mean is that they live, emotionally and intellectually speaking, from hand to mouth. They satisfy every need immediately, have little patience to learn, cannot easily endure frustration, and have no center within themselves, no sense of identity. They suffer from this and question themselves, their identity, and the meaning of life.
***
I have known many amazing people in my life, some of them young people. One young person I knew was intensely vivacious, intelligent and spiritual and, for a number of reasons, had some trouble with the desires of her heart. What were they? What were the desires of her heart? Like many young people, she experimented and went on a few adventures to find out.
She learned early on that if she bought the bill of good the hucksters sell us, the lie that the desires of our hearts are simply the desires of our flesh, that she’d end up miserable, empty and addicted. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll taught her that.
And yet she had no one in her life who could help her understand how to channel her heart’s desire, or as Beatle George says, “I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love”. A woman of intense love and profound desire, she could not, on her own, come up with reasonable boundaries to enable her desire – her love – to be productive. Which of us could – on our own? I don’t know why nobody tells us how to unfold our love – especially in the Church, when this is what becoming “fully mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28) is all about. It’s even what the simplicity of the Ten Commandments is all about.
And so she would often fall into grave and foolish situations that would later cause her much shame. There was little hope that she would find the kind of guidance to be presented “fully mature in Christ”, little chance that she would stumble upon a writer or a friend or a pastor or anyone who could keep her from selling out or from escaping the fate that George laments, “They bought and sold you”.
But there’s always love, always the love between friends. That may yet save her from the fate of the age – though the last I heard, she was tenaciously pursuing success in the corporate world, as if such a thing were the essence of the “desires of her heart”.
***
Don’t we get it?
Don’t we see how if all our love were made for is shopping malls, video games and promiscuous sexual encounters in person or over the internet that we are no better than the beasts – indeed we’re a good deal worse?
I say again that what we desperately need in the Church is guidance in sanctification. We need not just the passing feelings that may or may not strike us during Mass, but we need a conscious and integrated approach of becoming “fully mature in Christ” – of becoming Adults who Can Love.
A 1st rate piece, in every respect.
The fact is, the mass of people are less and less blameworthy in this regard as time goes on. The consumerist/ advertising culture and its purveyors are increasingly cagey about how to manipulate masses of people, and astonishingly aggressive about doing so. Witness the recent Pokemon phenomenon, targeted at infants barely out of the cradle. Minds so enslaved are incapable of independent thought or reflection, and will grow up so. Any spiritual development is even further beyond possibility.
The “human animal” is not as sophisticated as we like to imagine, contra Darwinistic assumptions–indeed, the cruel reality is almost a perfect natural chastisement to the presumptions of this era dominated by both science and, more usually, scientism. It is no accident that the ascendant political demagoguery is not only fueled by mass-manipulators who are well aware of this, but directed by them. These outfits are for hire; any seller of products, group or NGO, and either political party can purchase their expertise, which is simply how to invade the soul via the eye and the ear in a microsecond, and then bring it back for more.
As an attorney, I had significant encounter some years ago with the victims of cults and their brainwashing techniques. Even after deprogramming, some victims have had their inner mechanics so devastated that complete recovery is not possible. The level of deprogramming necessary to deal with some of the most serious victims also has its own risks.
Television remains the prime blockage at large to anything resembling a genuine spiritual life– with pop music, the computer, and the increasing plethora of iphones & other such gadgets on its heels. The illusions created by such fare are actually physically addicting, like mainlining drugs. This is established by a groundbreaking study in Scientific American a couple decades ago, “Television Addiction is no Mere Metaphor” which is still widely available on the internet. Only the vary rare soul is prescient about such dangers; T.S. Eliot wrote the BBC in the late 40s imploring it to stay out of television, having already witnessed its effects in the children of his American friends.
Unfortunately Catholic educators, including spiritual directors, remain largely unaware. Or, more commonly, ape this culture and make pathetic attempts to compete with it on its own turf. RENEW was nothing but notorious small group fascism that corresponded, in many key steps, to the total personality control I dealt with in cults. A key ingredient in each is ridicule and sarcasm targeted on hold-outs, aimed at breaking down pre-existing attitudes and loyalties outside the group. This also occurs of course in mass political “consensus building.”
“Group leaders” (ala Christopher West) have a hawk’s eye for spotting interior resistors in an audience. Such persons are called out in the face of the others, and used for humor–i.e. public mocking of their privacy and chastity in the case of “the theology of the body” crowd. Nor are “conservative” or “traditional– or for that matter “traditionalist”–groups immune to these behaviors. I have unfortunately personally witnessed such examples.
But the human desire for love and acceptance, even by a faceless mass, is a powerful tide. Buy the product, etc. It is love which they think they are buying, you see. So it is quite important to avoid using it in a generalistic sense as simply some higher state to be desired.